Race Relations Much Worse Thanks To Obama And Holder

Division: A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to post-racial America. Under our first black president and "Great Uniter," polling shows a serious worsening of race relations.

Remember Los Angeles-based street artist Shepard Fairey's famous red, beige and blue Obama "Hope" poster for the 2008 campaign? In the heady days of early 2009, the New Yorker magazine's art critic declared that Fairey had "created the most efficacious American political illustration since 'Uncle Sam Wants You.'"

The week before that grandiose pronouncement, the then-new attorney general of the U.S., Eric Holder, made his own grandiose remark: "Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been, and we, I believe, continue to be, in too many ways a nation of cowards."

Holder vowed back then that his Justice Department "must and will leave the nation to the 'new birth of freedom'" promised by Abe Lincoln. But what has happened in the 4-1/2 years of Obama and Holder since then? Race relations have gone into a free fall.

According to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, the share of Americans who consider race relations "very good" or "fairly good" has plummeted from above 70% between 2009 and 2011 to only 52% today.

Perhaps most amazing is the poll's finding that just 38% of blacks in the U.S. — in spite of America's first black president being re-elected less than a year ago — hold a positive view of the current state of race relations. At the outset of Obama's presidency, by comparison, no doubt with Fairey's iconic, feel-good image in mind, nearly 80% of whites and some 63% of blacks had a favorable viewpoint on ties between the races.

Are the ingredients for racial combustion swirling dangerously together this midsummer? With the public still digesting George Zimmerman's exoneration on all charges in the death of Trayvon Martin, a racially charged new offering from leading Hollywood lefty Harvey Weinstein is hitting movie houses.

"Fruitvale Station," with Oscar written all over it, plays fast and loose with the facts of the shooting of unarmed black 22-year-old Oscar Grant by a white policeman in Oakland on New Year's Day 2009.

Every chance Barack Obama and Eric Holder get, they seem to pick at the nation's healing racial wounds.

Taking sides against a jury's decision, the Great Uniter declared that "Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago," and later called for a national "conversation" on race — code for "endless lectures" by the left.

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